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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28929405">you die without knowing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias'>Alias (anafabula)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age of the Beholding (The Magnus Archives), Banned Together Bingo 2020, Becoming an avatar, Being pretty much at peace with becoming an avatar, Canon-Typical The End Content (The Magnus Archives), Character Study, Cosmic Horror Elements, Drowning, Episode: e121 Far Away (The Magnus Archives), Episode: e168 Roots (The Magnus Archives), Free will and the lack thereof, Minor Character Death, Oliver Banks's anxiety disorder(s), Other, Sort Of, The End (entity), and also some horror imagery I'm not very sure how to tag for?, just a whole lot of thinking about death in various ways</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:28:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,122</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28929405</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>After he dies, Oliver’s body sinks like a stone.</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Oliver Banks &amp; The End</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Banned Together Bingo 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you die without knowing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24549373">black electric blue</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo">escherzo</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Filling "<code>Black Character with Agency</code>" with just about any avatar feels like pushing it a little, but, well - it's not like the series has that cordial a relationship with agency as a concept, and "opt into what you hotswap yours with" is about as much as is on offer for anyone, you know?</p><p>escherzo's fic left me with the concept of Oliver coming back to go to and fro in the earth and all that after the events of his statement in MAG121 on foot and this giving him time to think, so I hope marking it as inspirational is okay. </p><p>(It's a very good fic, you should read it if you haven't; sneakily inspired-by is my way of pushing recs extra hard, don't tell anyone.)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After he dies, Oliver’s body sinks like a stone.</p><p>Or like the wreckage of a junked satellite and a doomed ship, he supposes. Exactly like that, for the first little while, as his body’s borne down by the rapidly-cooling twisted memory of metal; it had come down screaming, he knows, in the way that metal screams, in white-hot atmospheric friction, but the center of the South Pacific Gyre is extraordinarily cold, and cold wins such arguments every time.</p><p>It’s not peaceful, exactly, but… something in the genre, he thinks. No one else is peaceful. The people who’d gone down with him are – not visible to him, the water that closes around him and brooks no argument in it gets dark very quickly even if he were looking – but he knows somehow that everyone else on the ship is not, in fact, sinking peacefully, because they’re dead and past the point of peace being an option that matters.</p>
<hr/><p>Eventually he drifts free of the combined wreckage, some infinitesimal difference in trajectory paying off even in the still water. He keeps sinking anyway, which is odd. The dead bodies won’t be sinking; human bodies float, almost to a fault.</p><p>The dead bodies won’t be thinking, either, though, so presumably it’s just an Oliver thing on both accounts.</p><p>(This thought occurs to him first. There is a significant lag, actually, before its logical follow-up: that he’s established ‘an Oliver thing’ is mutually exclusive, at least in this, from the prospect of being human. Later, after another delay, he’ll wonder what he is; later still, of course, he’ll stop.)</p><p>He doesn’t feel heavy enough not to be buoyant – will confirm later, out of curiosity and also a desire not to sink the ship bringing him the rest of the way back to land, that he isn’t, absence of air in his lungs notwithstanding – as he slowly drifts downward. He feels… pulled, instead. He supposes that’s to be expected. Having guidance from the beating vein of his own death because he’s wandering about being not alive makes as much sense as anything else.</p><p>Oliver’s feet land on the ocean floor, eventually; he does land standing up. Which is good; he’s not sure how exactly he’d have managed otherwise, feels nonsensically that if he stopped touching the bottom right now – if he ‘let go’ – he wouldn’t get his footing again. Doesn’t know what that means would come next.</p><p>He decides not to do that, regardless, upon some consideration. But he does think about it, a little, in the deciding.</p>
<hr/><p>There is no particular doubt in his mind as to where he’s going, once he decides on walking instead. Even if he didn’t know the way, he’d hardly be at a loss for finding it. The ground is thick with veins still, all that death fresh and self-evident, pulsing steadily with just enough light for Oliver to see by.</p><p>Oliver walks.</p><p>He doesn’t get tired, he discovers, after enough of a feeling of time that the question occurs to him in the first place; he’d <em>been</em> exhausted for so long, from the restlessness, that he almost doesn’t know how to interpret the complete and supernatural absence of fatigue now that it’s been given to him instead. He can’t sleep here, obviously, but he wonders a bit whether he’ll be able to when he – after. Wonders which answer he’d prefer. He’s not sure yet.</p><p>It occurs to him eventually that, insofar as he can see anything, he’s belatedly acquired the level of expertise he’d been faking. Not in chemistry, or anything. But there’s parts of the ocean floor no human being will ever see; presumably he’s walking through quite a few of them.</p><p>Not really qualified to report on his findings, though. Even if he wanted to. So that’s just as well.</p>
<hr/><p>Oliver had thought, early on, that dying would at least settle his nerves, so to speak. Certainly seemed like he’d managed <em>something</em> in the way of such things, on his not-quite-pilgrimage back to shore.</p><p>Later he was disabused of this notion, of course, discovering instead that the reason he’d thought he wasn’t going to stay terminally awkward was that he’d not yet had the opportunity to prove otherwise by talking to people, until he did. And then it’s not like he got much practice, all things considered – limited social circle it gives you, turning quietly into a monster and insisting on going about the world after. Even in the grips of his second go with what he was <em>very</em> sure was supernatural assistance on the Archivist’s part, he couldn’t stop second-guessing his digressions to save his life.</p><p>(Not that his life needed saving, but, well. Rather the point, that.)</p><p>He’s more <em>sure</em> of things, now, but dying didn’t make him any less terminally anxious, despite all logic and some irony. Becoming the embodiment of death itself on the timelessly ruined earth, not quite eternal but as close as anyone’s getting, though – that seems to have done the trick.</p><p>Go figure.</p>
<hr/><p>It’s not that the parallels escape him, after the Change itself, when he takes stock of what he’s – been given, he supposes. There are even some drowning victims in the myriad set he oversees, playing out a path like his own in reverse; he checked. Oliver could make the comparisons very easily if he felt anything about it.</p><p>It’s just that he’s not particularly impressed.</p><p>The inhabitants of Oliver’s domain walk to their deaths and it rhymes with the way he’d walked from his own, ruminating and deliberate, yes, but they are each and every one of them utterly fixed in their mode of being already. In the fear – obviously – that emanates from them and mixes like the living sea once did, that Oliver of course drinks in.</p><p>But more than that, they’re fixed in being things small enough to be afraid; they will be exactly the same as they are now for as long as he has them, and then they will die, and at every step they’ve already relinquished the opportunity to instead do or be anything else. Any comparison’s purely aesthetic, at most, and seems a bit facile at that.</p><p>When it comes to speaking to the Archivist – through the Archivist? It’s a… unique feeling, certainly – it turns out the third time’s the charm for him. Or maybe it’s the structure of the statement, or the horrifying transformation of the world around him, or the fact that he would’ve chosen to tell Jon all of it if the Archivist still were something that could ask.</p><p>It’s nice to be sure of himself, Oliver thinks, regardless of the reason. It’s nice that he is satisfied with being, at last, only and exactly the thing he is.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This didn't quite turn out to be what I expected it to, but I'm not sure what that expectation was, in retrospect. One hopes you've enjoyed the thing it is instead, regardless.</p><p>On another note: seems unfair that the "Canon-Typical The End Content" tag isn't canonical yet, tbh. @ ao3 End Content rights when</p></blockquote></div></div>
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